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Thought Leader
concerns, positive or otherwise, would be attended to by the
team. These findings were borne out consistently despite
variables such as a team’s goals, process, or even the style
of its leader.
Safety Starts with Leaders
In a recent blog post, I explored the approach that
animation giant Pixar takes to creating a safe environment
for break-through story telling. In his 2014 book Creativity
Inc, Pixar’s CEO Ed Catmull demonstrates his belief that a
big part of his job is fostering that condition.
In one telling example, Catmull describes a deal he made
with his co-founder Steve Jobs: Catmull would commit to
stay at Pixar if Jobs would agree to forego attending the
meetings where unfettered truth-telling was essential to the
success of their films. Despite his brilliance, Jobs was
known as the last leader on earth you’d look to for creating
a safe environment. Catmull knew he had to protect against
the risk of Jobs’ larger-than-life style overwhelming
people’s need to speak the hard truths.
While Catmull didn’t use the term, he was describing
psychological safety as an essential ingredient of success
for Pixar’s film makers. If you’re a leader like Catmull
looking to adopt the same practice for your teams, special
care and attention are required.
Here are three essentials for leadership that make a
difference:
Develop clear goals and ground rules.
People in teams need enough common focus to feel
competent to do the work at hand--hard to find in a world
that is always shifting under their feet. Whether it’s stated
outcomes for a last-minute meeting, short-term milestones
on a project path, or high level objectives in a charter,
effective teams share a common view of what they are
trying to accomplish. Period.
Psychological safety cannot exist in an on-going state of
ambiguity. While they may not know what the future will
look like in a month or a year, they can be clear about the
nature and scope of what they are working on right now. If
it needs to change, so be it-and that requires a discussion,
some decision-making, and a collective reset.
Setting the team up with ground rules, as clearly stated
norms, goes a long way to creating mindfulness about
individual actions. Despite our best intentions, not everyone
is naturally inclined to set aside their positions to hear what
others are thinking. Pressure, timelines, and politics just
compound the challenge. Getting a team’s agreement on
simple ground rules, such as “Equal access to the air
waves” or “Listen before you give an opinion” can shift
team members’ inclinations. Keep ground rules spare and
specific, revisit them often. And, most especially as the
leader: Hold the line when someone crosses it.
Actively commit to creating psychological safety.
Google is hardly packed with touchy-feely types who
expect to be talking about emotions at work. However, one
leader described the value of having actual data that
demonstrated the importance of paying attention to the
subtle or even blatant barriers to people’s experience of
safety on a team. The most common: Members getting shut
down without a hearing on a controversial opinion, or being
marginalized because of stylistic differences. These and
other issues like them need to be noticed, named, and
resolved as soon as they appear-and if the leader doesn’t
start, who will?
But it doesn’t stop there for leaders. In her research on
teams, Stanford Professor Maggie Neale (2) has
demonstrated the potential of diversity - when and if a team
can take advantage of each member’s perspective. Neale
emphasizes the importance of actually managing diversity
so that the team creates an inclusive culture that enables
healthy dynamics and solid results.
Even if no one else does, leaders need to keep the
importance of psychological safety front and center,
especially about their own actions. If a team has ground
rules about equal access to air time, yet the leader
repeatedly does most of the talking or lets the two high
status members take over, the team faces not only a loss of
safety but the cynicism that results when a leader says one
thing and does another. Which brings me to the third
essential for team leaders…
Take a hard look in a good mirror.
Having the ability to see their impact on others is the place
to start. A leader may truly believe in the power of
collaboration, understand the importance of psychological
safety on a team, AND continue to act in ways that create
the opposite effect. I am continually astounded by how hard
it can be for well-intentioned people to change their habits
and patterns.
|NOVEMBER 2016
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